When her granddaughter was accepted to Naropa University, the celebrated author Pema Chödrön promised that she'd speak at the commencement ceremony. Fail, Fail Again, Fail Better contains the wisdom shared on that day. "What do we do when life doesn't go the way we hoped?" begins Pema. "We say 'I'm a failure.'" But what if failing wasn't just "okay"... but the most direct way to becoming a more complete, loving, and fulfilled human being?

From Fear to Fearlessness: Teachings on the Four Great Catalysts of Awakening

Where will we look when we are afraid? How do we find strength? In what can we place our trust? According to Tibetan Buddhism, there are four noble aspirations, known as the Four Great Catalysts of Awakening, which we can call on to cultivate strength and openness in any situation.From Fear to Fearlessnessbrings us into the company of beloved teacher Pema Chödrön to discover and cultivate these four immeasurables: maitri (loving-kindness), compassion, joy, and equanimity.

Making Friends with Your Mind: The Key to Contentment

Have you ever found yourself thinking your way into a tangle of fret, frustration, or gloom? And then something small - a few kind words, the sun glancing through the clouds, a warm cup of tea - gave you a welcome pause from all your inner chatter? With Making Friends with Your Mind, that's what Pema Chödrön helps us to do, not by chance but with our full intention: to stop fighting with our thoughts and reopen ourselves to wonder as naturally as we breathe.

Walking the Walk: Putting the Teachings into Practice When It Matters Most

It's one thing to hear a life-changing truth or to have a conceptual grasp on spiritual wisdom. But it’s another thing to "walk the walk" - or to put into practice the good advice we've been given. What does it mean to walk the walk in our everyday lives? According to Pema Chödrön, it means being down-to-earth, genuine, and perhaps most importantly, it means engaging in the teachings in order to actively confront anything and everything we’ve heretofore rejected in our attempts to find happiness.

Unconditional Confidence

Pema Chodron is one of today's leading meditation teachers. With more than one million books sold to date, she draws sold out crowds across the U.S. and Canada. On Unconditional Confidence, she offers two accessible sessions to help anyone find courage in times of challenge and change.

On Getting Unstuck, Pema Chodron introduces a rare Tibetan teaching she received from her teacher, Dzigar Kontrul Rinpoche, and one that has become critical to her practice. Here, she unveils the mystery of an ineffable quality; a "pre-emotional" feeling that arises in us, brings us discomfort, and causes us to react by escaping the discomfort, often with harmful habits. With Getting Unstuck, she offers us a first look at "both the itch and the scratch": what Tibetan Buddhists call shenpa.

True Happiness: Happiness Is Your Birthright

In True Happiness, Pema Chödrön guides us through simple yet effective practices that show us how to recognize and nurture these moments of delight, cultivating them until they become more and more frequent, accessible, and real. Recorded at Gampo Abbey Monastery in Nova Scotia, True Happiness features highlights from Sounds True's full-length audio learning course of the same title and gives you the opportunity to absorb the teachings of Pema Chödrön at your own pace.

Coming Closer to Ourselves: Making Everything the Path of Awakening

In challenging times, why do so many of us turn to Pema Chödrön for guidance? Many say that it’s her honest and caring way of communicating the core teachings of Buddhism - not just conceptually, but directly from her heart to ours. In these inspiring sessions, she teaches us how to give that compassion to the person we neglect most often - ourselves.

The Truth of Our Existence: Four Teachings from the Buddha to Illuminate Your Life

What would happen if we looked with fresh eyes at the struggles and "impossible situations" that we face every day - and found there four gifts that changed everything? For decades, Pema Chödrön has brought clarity and heart to the core teachings of the Buddha, helping to make them relevant and useful in our everyday lives. With The Truth of Our Existence, she immerses us in one of Buddhism’s essential distillations of written wisdom known as The Four Marks of Existence.

Awakening Love: Teachings and Practices to Cultivate a Limitless Heart

Have you ever wanted to love and connect with others more deeply... but felt that you could use a little help shedding your "emotional armor" and opening your heart? With Awakening Love, Pema Chodron invites you to start wherever you are, amid any and all of the challenges, frustrations, or fears you may be facing, and to use them as the starting place to awaken the natural and boundless capacity to give and receive love more fully.

Noble Heart: A Self-Guided Retreat on Befriending Your Obstacles

You can't get away from suffering. That's the good news, teaches Pema Chodron. For at the core of your most painful experiences, you will find the seeds of your awakening. On Noble Heart, this best-selling author and Tibetan Buddhist nun shows you how vulnerability is our greatest spiritual resource amid life's difficulties. Using special meditations and teachings, she shows how to cultivate your own noble heart, one that sheds its armor, and opens fearlessly to both heartache and delight.

The Pema Chodron Audio Collection

Pema Chodron, one of the West's most beloved teachers of Buddhism, makes the Tibetan vajrayana tradition accessible in today's world. Now three of her most popular teachings are available in one audiobook set.

Publisher's Summary

Finding freedom in our most difficult circumstances.

What if the full sense of our aliveness were only to be found amidst our most challenging times and difficult experiences? In pain and crisis, teaches Pema Chödrön, there lies a hidden doorway to freedom that appears to us only when we're sure that there is no way out.

In these intimate audio learning sessions, Pema Chödrön helps us distinguish the triggers or external events that we blame for our suffering from the deeper habitual patterns that feed our anger, fear, or sadness. From this understanding, we learn how to free ourselves from our propensity to suffer through the transformative awareness of impermanence - the dynamic and ever-shifting nature of both joy and suffering, self and selflessness-and the absolute and eternal flow from which all of it arises.

What is causing my pain? What will happen if I simply lean in, keep company with it, hold it with tenderness? Moment by moment, Pema supports and encourages listeners to bring an openhearted sense of curiosity and welcoming to our apparently impossible situations or unbearable relationships - to discover the deeper freedom available just beneath the surface.

For those experiencing emotional crisis, When Pain Is the Doorway provides expert guidance to help us stop, stay present, and enter into a more welcoming, spacious place of being that is our true home.

Where does When Pain is the Doorway rank among all the audiobooks you’ve listened to so far?

This topic is basically 'Charnal ground practice' which is interacting with/coming to terms with one's own interactions with and reaction to death. There is discussion on approaches to death and how that applies to our experience of life. It is clear that Pema is coming to terms with this subject, and this talk reflects that more than other talks which may be more concretized in regards to information. I still found it highly valuable and enjoyable.This topic is fairly short and a specific guided meditation is not included, however techniques for working with the topic are discussed, as well as experiences and approaches of people working with it. This is a lecture with some very good question and answers at the end. This is not a full retreat and so does not have the lengthy discussion with multiple meditation sessions during the lecture.I find Pema very approachable as a listener due to her humility and complete honesty. This allows me to listen to not only what she is teaching, but how she embodies walking her spiritual path.

What was one of the most memorable moments of When Pain is the Doorway?

It is in the sample recording I believe. Pema describes a hospice worker helping someone who is terrified to die, and what seems to work is telling the person to 'rest in the space' between breaths when this person is having severe difficulty breathing. She also describes her own and other's experiences working Charnal ground practice, and views of life working it -- as a way of working 'things are falling apart'.

What does Pema Chödrön bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you just read the book?

I don't think a book would include her honest revelations 'I get panic attacks' that in some ways are so profound - she just accepts it like everything else. Those to me keep all the work and talks 'real'. I don't think that would make print in a polished book, yet it sets the ground for life's problems to be acceptable for anyone. I also find integrating this information easier listening to it versus reading it.

If you were to make a film of this book, what would the tag line be?

"Death is the paintbrush of Life"

Any additional comments?

It's a short topic (about 2 hrs). It doesn't give all the answers but does spend time there.

I had expected that this would be a talk primarily on physical pain. Instead it was on harboring bad feelings against a person. Very short talk and very long question and answer period. The questions brought up other topics, such as fear of death, but did not touch on physical pain or illness.